Veronique de Rugy: Trump’s budget would lock in big-government spending and deficits

President Donald Trump s skinny budget is out and at first glance it gives small-government advocates reason to cheer It proposes deep cuts to domestic agencies calls for eliminating redundant programs and gestures toward reviving federalism by shifting power and responsibility back to the states It promises to slash overreaching woke initiatives end international handouts and abolish bureaucracies that have outlived their usefulness But this budget is more rhetorical than revolutionary As impressive as Trump s envisioned cuts are billion worth they lose luster because the version of the budget being considered in Congress also calls for increases to defense and boundary prevention spending as well as the extension of the tax cuts And for all its fiery declarations the budget fails to truly confront the drivers of our fiscal emergency The budget does thankfully enshrine the Department of Cabinet Efficiency s acknowledgment that federal sprawl has become unmanageable It proposes defunding environmental-justice programs trimming National Institute of Wellbeing and National Science Foundation budgets slashing the Department of Development and eliminating corporate welfare masquerading as weather strategy It also rightly calls for cutting the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities two anachronisms with no constitutional justification Art and tuition don t need federal management they need freedom The budget retreats from Washington s micromanagement of local affairs Mentoring grants housing subsidies and green-energy projects are best cut and handled by state governments or the private sector One-size-fits-all federal fixes for everything from school lunches to water systems have failed Devolving authority isn t just constitutional it s practical But these trims are wrapped in a document that nevertheless sustains a bloated establishment Even with the reductions discretionary spending would remain essentially unchanged at trillion In chosen respects the budget enshrines Biden-era spending Then there s defense For all the America First rhetoric about maintaining a domestic focus Trump s budget does nothing to rein in the Pentagon s fiscal free-for-all aimed at projecting power around the world Quite the opposite It proposes a increase pushing base defense spending past trillion including billion in discretionary spending supplemented by billion in mandatory spending and an additional billion to be passed through Congress reconciliation process The Pentagon remains the largest federal bureaucracy and among the least accountable It hasn t passed a full audit since yet it gets a raise If peace through strength means blank checks for defense contractors and redundant weapons systems we need to rethink our definition of strength Consider the new F- fighter jet included in this budget As Jack Nicastro notes in Reason magazine this aircraft billed as the largest part advanced ever built is being developed to replace the F- which has been a taxpayer-funded boondoggle So far the F- has cost taxpayers more than billion far beyond the initial projected cost and is expected to total trillion over its lifespan It s suffered from technical failures including at particular point having problems flying in the rain and certain doubt it will ever be fully functional Considering the establishment incentives that gave us the F- mess still exist and given that aerial combat is shifting toward automated or remotely piloted systems why would we believe our money will be better spent on the F- Trump s budget also boosts Homeland Guard spending propping up another sprawling bureaucracy The president s high-profile and problematic approach to deportation while politically popular with his constituency costs a lot of money As the Cato Institute s David Bier notes indiscriminate deportations pitfall shrinking the workforce reducing tax revenue and undercutting economic rise all while ignoring the merit-based immigration reforms Trump alleges to encouragement Eventually there s the ever-present elephant in the room entitlements Social Defense Medicare and Medicaid make up nearly of spending and are the main drivers of our debt Yet they are mostly untouched in the current fiscal sketch The administration promises a more complete plan later to show where the savings would be detected but we ve heard that before and House Speaker Mike Johnson stated last week that Republicans would block specific of the majority effective approaches to cutting Medicaid But the math is straightforward Without serious entitlement amendment no discretionary spending cuts can avert a debt emergency The bipartisan failure to govern responsibly isn t just a strategy lapse it s a moral one Deficit spending and the burden of debt repayment crowds out private assets fuels inflation and burdens future generations with obligations they have no say over The U S is on track to exceed its World War II-era debt record by If this budget is truly the plan to reverse unit we re in trouble Yes the new Trump budget has bright spots but those gains are neutralized by massive defense spending costly immigration priorities and persistent gimmicks At best it maintains a flawed status quo We don t need more of the same we need evidence of a serious turnaround Until that happens we have little choice but to assume that Trump s budget is another big-government blueprint in small-government clothing Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate